We have seen a lot of interest on Arduino from individuals and user groups who prefer using open-source collateral and info useful for their development on embedded designs. This document provides a small insight into the Arduino community.
About Arduino
For nearly a year now we have seen regular requests on Arduino. Whilst we at Farnell are aware of the name, we have been a little unfamiliar with the exact details and how to offer the products to our customers, especially after having consulted a few manufacturers and industry-experts for their inputs. A few of us have been looking at working with the products for better understanding and perhaps put together something for those interested – individuals involved across Farnell UK, Italy & Holland. What you read below is an attempt to explain what is Arduino and what is available as well as where we, at Farnell, would fit. Needless to say we came across a number of barriers, including existing network of Arduino distributors expressing their views with respect to Farnell. Arduino is represented by a small number of regional specialists, mainly on-line. These agents make available the official Arduino hardware and the number of variants from 3rd parties. Remember, Arduino has open-source IDE and designs thereby allowing users to copy and make their own projects based on the material freely available.
Arduino was designed as a simple way into microcontroller electronics. In its simplest form, Arduino is a computer that can be programmed to process inputs/outputs (I/O) to and from the chip. The Arduino is essentially a Physical or Embedded Computing platform, an interactive system interacting with its environment through the use of hardware and software. The original Arduino hardware has been manufactured by the Italian company, Smart Projects. Some Arduino-branded boards have been designed by the American company, SparkFun Electronics.
By visiting website(s), it will be noted that there is a development team behind ‘Arduino’ that stipulates exclusive use of the name ‘Arduino’ for its own products but a number of clone-boards can be found with names such as Boarduino, Roboduino. These clone-boards would have to be compatible with the original Arduino and indeed with the open-source software & hardware designs. A number of Arduino-compatible products manufactured commercially use ‘duino’ name variants.
A recent addition to the family of the official hardware is the new ‘Arduino-Mega’. Current Arduino hardware is based on the Atmel AVR microcontroller, however, this is not a formal requirement. Official Arduinos have used the mega-AVR devices, such as the ATmega8, ATmega168, ATmega328, and ATmega1280. There are a number of clones that do not use ATmega micros, making them incompatible with the Arduino IDE but compatible with ‘Shield’ hardware and may support other IDEs. The ‘Cortino’ is a point in case, a development system for the 32bit ARM Cortex-M3 Processor. Circuit boards with devices such as transmitters/receivers, LCDs, connectivity protocols etc, allow for additional functionality by way of Extension (or daughter) Boards or even modules, called ‘Shields’.
A simple internet search on Arduino would reveal a number of dedicated websites to the Arduino. To learn more about the Arduino it’s probably a good idea to join the Forum on the Arduino website and to check out some of the codes and hardware examples. Download the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment - a piece of free software to enable programming in the language the Arduino understands.) along with the Code Samples.
Arduino primarily uses C language. The IDE enables the writing of a set of step-by-step instructions to be uploaded to the Arduino for it to then carry out those instructions and interact with the world outside. Such a program in the Arduino world is known as ‘Sketch’. Remember, both the Arduino hardware and software are ‘Open Source’; the code, the schematics, designs are openly available for anyone to use freely.
There are a number of the official hardware variants of the Arduino, for example, ‘Diecimila’ and ‘Duemilanove’-the most common and useable as programming socket, allowing for custom embedded devices. The embedded device can then be replaced by another in the Arduino provided it is preprogrammed with the Arduino Bootloader to enable it to work with the Arduino IDE. The bootloader can be preprogrammed with an AVR programmer. An Arduino’s microcontroller is also pre-programmed with a bootloader that allows for uploading of programs to the on-chipflash memory.
The Arduino IDE is a cross-platform application in Java and comes with a C/C++ library. It is designed to introduce programming to newcomers to software development. It includes a code editor, capable of compiling and uploading programs to the boards. Farnell is not an acting agent for Arduino but would endeavour to source official and 3rd party Arduino hardware for the requesting customers.
For details contact jgohlar@farnell.com
